Blogging Reality

“we should start from the notion of actuality as in its essence a process”

-A.N. Whitehead-

“there is only one thing you can do about the kinetic, reenact it…which..is why art is the only twin life has – its only valid metaphysic.  Art does not seek to describe but to enact.”

-Charles Olson-

“life is preoccupation with itself”

-Robert Creeley-

            If indeed “reality is continuous, not separable, and cannot be objectified [read “stopped” or “paused”].  We cannot stand aside to see it” (Robert Creeley), as our sciences and philosophies have come to speak of it.  If language is an enormous fluid complex of systems, of ideologies and referents, socio-physico-psychological sounds and gestures always forming their contents and functioning their forms, as it is currently prevalently demonstrated to be.

In other words:  if life is a process we are unable to abstract ourselves from without thereby ceasing to live.  And “the reality of life is organized around the ‘here’ of my body and the ‘now’ of my present” (Peter Berger) our organizational notions of space and time, or mass and motion…and therefore all existing things are moving about, around, against, in or through one another (“Nothing is itself taken alone.  Things are because of interrelations and interactions” – Wallace Stevens).

“If” these faith-based-in-observational-perceptive-categories are anything like “on the right” (correlative, coherent fluctuating track) “path,” saying something functional or “meaningful” (say here “true”) about humans and the world – how might we be conscious of it?  How align ourselves mind and body with an unceasing flow we are unable to “step aside” or “back” from in order to observe or reflect, remember, recount or experiment “on,” but can only, in reality/actuality act “in”?

Another version:  how might we have some idea or “knowledge,” apprehension of what we “do” living?  (“we do what we know before we know what we do” – Charles Olson).

One possibility is to enact our own forming processes in/into the motion of all things.

i.e. “everything, always, in life just as much as art, is precarious – since it is mutable, everything is a disappearing act.  Things only survive if given an artistic form.  Art is, therefore, in a way, more real than life.  It is only art which is not mutable, which does not disappear: everything else is transient.  Only art, with its passion for form, makes up a permanent version from the made-up things of this world” (Nabokov as termed through Adam Thirlwell).

But art does disappear.  It is mutated by translation and new readings in different times and languages and contexts, different versions/pictures of the world held by each and every member of its audience.  Is worn away, stolen, lost, damaged.  Art is also part of the fluid precarious flow of actuality/reality.

And yet, perhaps, the work of art, the making process itself, provides us with something like a “knowing” or apprehending process within the process life is?  Adding rivulets to the river in the river, additional possible processes in process.  If the artist seeks to make from the full experiencing of its present motion, the many layers and currents a human touches, senses, perceives (and imagines to themselves – a “putting-together,” “drawing,” “enacting presentation”) converting them through one’s self into text, paint, clay, dance, song and so forth…

…no “product,” like no “event” is immutable, spaceless, timeless or immobile, any more than a stone or the earth or sun or moon is, and yet…

“electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds” (Carole Maso)

“What I seek is an active seriality…I write because it is there to be written…it keeps happening and the way the world then enters, or how I’m also then known to myself, is a deeply fascinating circumstance…a deeper fact of revelation I feel very actual in writing, a realization, reification, of what is” (Robert Creeley)

In other words, art-making, enacting in paint, in text, in images, sound and movement, is activity, not a “subject.”  We cannot complete a story or poem or song about what is, because what is always keeps occurring, to blog, to write in such an unstable, ephemeral and mutable medium as light and electricity is, perhaps, an extremely mimetic, representational forming of life itself.

It’s there, it’s gone, it’s always in process, revision, adjustment, open to alteration, deletion, disappearance.  Arising and passing, like thoughts, emotions, utterances and sensations.  Like beliefs and love, wars and peace.  Nothing is stable…blog it so!  The medium chosen, like film, like music, like the fluids of paint and possibilities of stone, paper, clay – themselves are our activity and process of being.

Precarious, mutable and disappearing…and important (to us) and beautiful (at moments)…instants processed in the flow, circumstances in the ongoing situation, new contents and obstructions in the river.

Flow on bloggers!  Flow on!

“You’re simply stuck with the original visionary experience of having been you, which is a hell of a thing…

that which exists through itself is what is called meaning”

-Charles Olson-

and facts are just points of departure